Speaker Booking Info

keynotes

I am on a crusade to help leaders and employees create a more fulfilling work experience.

My keynotes and training programs are dedicated to this goal. Whether talking about employee engagement, relationships or leadership, my objective is always the same — to educate, entertain and inspire people to take action

“After seeing Jason speak I had to share him with my organization. Both his workshop and keynote on engagement received some of the highest feedback scores I’ve seen. One participant wrote, ’Wonderful presentation and relevant content. I left feeling empowered. And filled with creative ideas‘. As a speaker Jason has it all: credibility, creativity and great content!”

– Dawn Burke, VP of People, Daxko

Keynotes

Being the Best: The Surprising Secret to Building a Best Place to Work

Becoming a “Best Place to Work” is at the top of many organization’s priority lists. To attract and keep the best talent requires fostering an engaging culture where people want to work. But, building an extraordinary workplace is easier said than done. In fact, it’s hard to even know where to start.

This dynamic session will reveal research-based insights into the what, why and how of building and sustaining a “Best Place to Work” for your employees. And (spoiler alert) it’s not about installing ping pong tables or sleep pods.

Learning Objectives:

Understand what organizations with exceptional workplaces do differently than others to engage and retain their best talent.

Discover the common elements found within “Best Places to Work” and what they tell us about how to create the most engaging workplaces.

Gain practical advice for how to take action within your organization to implement the lessons from “Best Places to Work” in order to increase employee engagement and performance within your own organization.

Work has been defined in many ways over the years: a contract, a transaction, a value exchange. This led to describing humans as capital and designing systems that treat people like assets to be managed and optimized. Is it any wonder that employees’ feeling of engagement within these organizations continues to drop? It doesn’t feel good to be treated like an investment to be maximized.

To reverse this trend requires that we understand what work is for employees, a relationship, and a critically important one. Research has shown us that employees crave the same things from work that they do from other important relationships in their lives: appreciation, connection, acceptance, communication, and support. In this session, we will explore how designing the employee experience through the lens of a healthy relationship will focus your employee engagement efforts for greater impact.

Learning Objectives:

Deconstruct employee engagement practices to discover why and how the current model is falling short by focusing on maximizing employee discretionary effort.

Discover that for employees, work is an important relationship and that the work experience should be designed as a relationship for employees rather than as a company process to be optimized.

Gain a deeper understanding of the elements that make for a healthy relationship and how to use this model to design a more engaging and fulfilling experience for employees at work.

What Are You Waiting For? Find the Courage to Disrupt

As the pace of change accelerates, leaders must face the reality that what we’ve always done isn’t working any longer. Innovation is a requirement of survival. And innovation demands disruption.

Knowing disruption is needed is one thing, doing it is another. It requires an ingredient that can be hard to find: Courage. To do the work that will truly make a difference demands that you face your fears of failure and rejection and move beyond them.

In this session, we will confront the most common fears that are holding you back and replace them with the mindset and skill to find your courage.

Learning Objectives:

Identify key mental obstacles that are holding you back from making a bigger impact.

It seems that everyone these days is saying that business is now “social.” The rise of social media and other technology has changed how we do business. These same technologies are changing the very nature of work and how the workplace must be designed. The truth is, business has always been social, and so has work. Technology has simply unleashed the power of social in new and powerful ways.

This evolution has revealed that our traditional models for cultivating talent are insufficient. The new equation for talent isn’t just about building human capital (the knowledge, skills and abilities). It must also include social capital (the value that exists within relationships) if you are to unlock your organization’s true capability for innovation and performance. This thought provoking and actionable session will reveal to you the new talent equation and how the next evolution for Human Resources is to become the social architect of the organization.

Learning Objectives:

Explore how the evolution of the organization and the rise of social technology has fundamentally changed how value is created within the organization. Uncover how this shift now requires an expanded definition of talent that considers the power of personal relationships and networks as an amplifier of impact.

Discover how cultivating connection as a means to build social capital is an under-utilized but powerful strategy for gaining competitive advantage

Learn six powerful strategies with twelve specific tactics for creating a work environment that fosters connection and grows social capital as means to fuel innovation, engagement and performance across the organization.

Hacking HR: Big Change Starts with Thinking Small

Driving innovation in HR can feel overwhelming. Just the idea of innovation is intimidating—as if the big breakthrough is somehow always just beyond our reach. This is fueled by some common misunderstandings about how innovation works. The truth: innovation isn’t about big changes. And it doesn’t even require a big budget, a big title, or any permission. The changes that matter don’t happen overnight, they are the result of a lot of small, meaningful changes over time. Computer programmers and hackers have known this for years and we’ve reaped the technological rewards.

Applying insights from the computer hacking culture, Jason Lauritsen and Joe Gerstandt will teach you a simple but incredibly powerful process for hacking your work in HR. This process will help you and your team to innovate and make progress in your work, one small change at a time. Regardless of your title or experience, you can make big things happen through a series of smart, small changes (hacks).

Workplace Application: Drive improvement and innovation within your work in HR by applying a powerful and simple process derived from hacking.

Learning Objectives:

Participants will gain a deeper understanding for how change and innovation occurs.

Participants will learn to use a simple process derived from computer hacking to drive change and progress in their work in HR, regardless of their level or expertise.

Participants will practice hacking an actual aspect of their work (for example: team meetings, performance appraisals, preparing reports, etc.) and will leave with actionable ideas that can be implemented immediately.

Power & Politics in the Organization: Understanding the Game

Driving change inside an organization is hard. Without the ability to influence others thinking and decisions, it can feel nearly impossible.

This session will explore the role that power and politics play in organizational decision making. As a leader, understanding these dimensions can mean the difference between effectiveness and irrelevance.

We will explore these questions:

Where does power come from?

Why should I want more power and how do I get it?

How does politics affect the role as a leader?

Attendees will gain practical skills and approaches for how to grow their influence with the organization to become more effective leaders and agents of change.

Learning Objectives:

Learn to reframe power and politics not as barriers to progress, but rather as tools.

Gain a deeper understanding of how and why leaders make decisions.

Discover a practical approach to securing buy-in and support by leveraging the fundamentals of the sales process.